Inconvenient file-transfer process. Mobile apps all but unusable. No web app. Poorly designed for time-disparate teams. Ugly and dated interface.

Bottom Line

Brosix is a secure instant messaging program for teams, but while it delivers on security, its downfall is usability.

Brosix is a lesser-known app in the online collaboration space. It might give you flashbacks to the late 1990s, because it functions, looks, and feels like an older instant messaging service (think AIM), rather than the team messaging apps that have become so popular in the last few years, such as Slack. On paper, Brosix offers ample features at a competitive price. But the real strength is the app's security. While it delivers on facilitating real-time chat among colleagues securely, however, it's not an app you or your teammates will likely enjoy using. Slack and Atlassian HipChat both offer a lot more and are more pleasurable to use, though you may want to read up on their security policies to make sure they meet your needs.

Pricing and Plans

Most team messaging apps offer a free but limited tier of service, as well as paid plans. Brosix does, too, although its free Personal plan is a little different from those of other team messaging apps. Instead of limiting features or the search history, Brosix Personal prevents you from creating a private, restricted chat network. The Personal plan actually includes some features that are not available to all tiers of paid accounts, such as screen-sharing and whiteboarding. You get those with the Personal plan, but not in Brosix's Basic plan.

Among the paid plans, which again give you the major advantage of being able to create a private, restricted network, there are three tiers of service: Basic, Pro, and Ultimate. For all these plans, I provide the monthly, per-person cost below. Broxis offers discounts when paying for three months or a year upfront, as is usual with many business software services.

Brosix Basic costs 99 cents per person per month, and it's really basic. You get a secure and encrypted text chat app, and all your chats are archived, but that's about all you get. Other features, such as video calls, audio calls, and the ability to share files, are not included. You can't even create private groups with the Basic account.

The next level up, Brosix Pro, costs $2.10 per person per month. With Pro, you get everything in the Basic plan plus chat rooms, file transfer, screen sharing, whiteboarding, audio calls, video calls, and more. Brosix handles file-sharing on a peer-to-peer basis, which in turn means there are no storage upload limits. It also means that files are not perpetually available to everyone on your team. Sharing them and storing them somewhere safe and accessible is up to you. Brosix Pro is the level I tested.

Brosix Ultimate costs $2.99 per user per month, and it contains everything in Pro, plus a bunch of administrator controls, and a handful of additional features. For example, Ultimate administrators can prevent users from changing their display names from their actual names to something the user might think is clever but everyone else finds confusing and annoying. One extra feature in Ultimate is the ability to broadcast a message to all users, which is under tight administrator control.

Brosix is appropriately priced, as most team messaging apps put their pro or premium account in the same $2 to $3 range per person per month. Slack is the only app that charges astronomically more than anyone else, at a rate of $8 per person per month for Standard service. Slack's Plus level comes in at a hefty $15 per person per month!

Atlassian HipChat charges just $2 per person per month for its Plus account. Flock costs $3 per user per month for a Pro plan. Ryver, another competitor, is totally free. The company plans to charge for an integrated project management application, which is still forthcoming as of this writing. Even Workplace by Facebook, which is a social network but has some team messaging features included, starts at just $3 per active user per month.

Newcomer to the team messaging space Twist (by Doist) charges closer to what Slack does, but at $6 per person per month for an Unlimited account, it's still less expensive. Glip by RingCentral also charges more than many others: $5 per person per month for a Basic account, and $10 per person per month for Pro.

Name and Address

When I first encountered Brosix I emailed my contact at the company to find out the name's origin story. He replied that the name is actually a conjunction of "brothers" and "Asterix." Brosix was founded by two brothers, Stefan and Svetoslav Chekanovi, and Stefan has a kid whose favorite movies at the time were the Asterix series, based on the popular French comic.

On the About section of the company website, Brosix lists addresses in Bulgaria and Delaware, although the latter is only a virtual office address used by many companies, likely to register in the US and the state of Delaware.

Setup and Features

In signing up for a Brosix account, you can get a free trial of one of the paid plans for 30 days. When you create an account, Brosix gives you a network number you need to sign in. The network number is the same for all the users in your account. It's unusual to see a randomly generated digit rather than a team name or custom URL for signing in, which is what many other apps use.

Brosix doesn't have a web app. To use the messaging service, you must install one of its apps for Windows, Linux, or Mac. There are apps for iOS and Android, too, but they're so poorly designed that they are practically unusable (more on the mobile apps later).

When the app first launched on my screen, I was mentally whisked back more than a decade into the past, to the days when my colleagues all used ICQ to chat. Brosix has a classic sidebar-style interface, taking up only a vertical rail of your screen. You can readjust the window size, but that won't stop the flashbacks as you recall your first ever Jabber handle.

The similarities to instant messaging programs don't end with the look and feel. Functionally, Brosix is closer to an instant messenger than a modern team chat app. Instant messaging apps typically don't have opt-in channels, which are a defining feature of team chat apps. Channels are open to anyone in the group to join, but they're optional.

For example, let's say I'm part of a team chat app for a sports league, and I live within walking distance of the place where we practice and compete. My team might have a channel called Carpool, where teammates discuss ride-sharing options, and I could optionally not join that channel because the topic of conversation doesn't pertain to me. If ever there's a time when a conversation in that channel does require my attention, one of my teammates can type an @ symbol before my name to flag my attention. In this way, team messaging apps are adept at letting people choose how involved they need to be in different topics of conversations.

Channels are closest thing Brosix has to private chat rooms, but they're not really the same thing at all. Private chat rooms are akin to private group messages. They're nothing more than invite-only groups. Brosix does have a Broadcast option in the Ultimate plan that allows you to send a message to everyone in your contacts list (administrators can limit which users can use the Broadcast feature), but that's not the same thing either.

Brosix alerts you when new messages arrive with a visual pop-up and an audio tone that sounds a little too much like a vibraslap for my taste. You can customize the notifications to some extent, but not nearly as much as you can in Slack. Slack offers notifications on screen, via push notification in the mobile app, as an SMS, or as an email. With Slack, you can also choose an audio tone that's more to your liking, whereas Brosix's options are on or off.

File-sharing is supported, but it's a dud if you work with a distributed team or a large number of people who are mobile-first users. You can only send a file if the recipient is actively logged in and chooses to receive it. With team messaging apps, you can upload files at any time, and the recipients can view them or download them at any time as well. That's part of the convenience.

Brosix supports other kinds of collaboration, such as video calls, screen-sharing, and whiteboarding. There's a one-touch button for taking a screenshot of your computer and immediately sharing it with others, as well. Brosix has a co-browsing feature, too, for Pro and Ultimate users. I had never heard of co-browsing before. Apparently it's similar to remote access control, but limited to the browser. It's not something I've seen in other team messaging apps as of this writing.

Secure Messaging

One thing Brosix does have going for it is strong security. As mentioned, Brosix uses peer-to-peer communication for file transfers, so documents you send through the app never go to Brosix's own servers. The company also uses Advanced Encryption Standards with 256-bit keys. Every Brosix channel uses a separate encryption key, and each key is negotiated on channel creation over an encrypted channel.

When information does have to go through Brosix for some reason, it goes through a tunnel server. The sender encrypts the message, and the recipient decrypts it. Brosix has no visibility into what's passing through the tunnel server, and never processes it nor stores it.

The company also mentions in its security information that because it doesn't process or store information, it's suitable for sectors that have strict legal requirements regarding data, such as financial and healthcare.

I don't want to give the impression that other team messaging apps are unsecured, but none that I've encoutered treat security with quite the same rigor as Brosix. Slack, for instance, encrypts messages in transit and at rest, but file transfers aren't peer-to-peer, and there isn't any tunneling happening for text chats. HipChat uses 256-bit SSL encryption to transmit data and files. Any organization that requires heightened security should review services' policies closely to make sure they meet team needs.

Mobile Apps and Integrations

Plainly put, Brosix's mobile apps are not worth using, with its iOS app marginally better than its Android app. When someone sends you files, you don't get a notification on the mobile app, and therefore you can't accept them. When I tried making a video call to the Android app, nothing at all happened in the app, no ring, no notification, no nothing.

The only thing you can do from the mobile app is text-chat back and forth with contacts and send them images (but not documents). The Android app doesn't even have navigation buttons or menus. I also could not quit the Brosix Android app. No matter how many different ways I tried to force it shut, a little Brosix icon remained in my notification area, indicating I was still signed in and available. I uninstalled it within a day.

Because Brosix focuses so much on heightened security, it's no surprise that the app doesn't connect with many other apps or services. You won't find easy integrations with Google Drive or Trello or any other online tool, like you do with Slack, HipChat, Twist, and other team messaging apps. Brosix does work with an application called Smarsh, however, to archive chat history.

Secure Instant Messaging, but Not Team Chat

Brosix is a secure instant messaging program that may be good for teams of people who work primarily at their desks (since the mobile apps aren't great) and who discuss sensitive information. It's not really a team chat app, however, even if it is sometimes compared with them. Team chat apps are marked by opt-in channels of conversation, rich notification tools, and reliable mobile apps. If you're in the market for a team chat app, look to Editors' Choices Slack and HipChat.

About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital forma... See Full Bio

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